Her Mother's Daughter
A Novel
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- £9.99
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- £9.99
Publisher Description
Famed feminist Marilyn French’s life-affirming saga celebrates the love and sacrifices of four generations of Polish-American mothers and daughters.
With Bella Dabrowski close to death, her daughter Anastasia, who has reinvented herself as Stacey Stevens, is trying to penetrate the longstanding barriers between them to understand the woman who gave her life.
Through the eyes of Stacey, a divorced, feminist New York photographer, we get to know Bella, a remarkable woman, wife, and mother. The daughter of Polish immigrants, Bella, who renamed herself Belle, clawed her way out of poverty and settled into a middle-class existence.
Shifting perspectives between the two women, the reader is drawn into Belle’s life through the lean years of the Depression as well as Stacey’s recollections of her youthful marriage, a lesbian affair, and her tempestuous relationship with her own daughter, Arden.
From the groundbreaking author of The Women’s Room, Her Mother’s Daughter explores past and present to reveal the complex, indestructible bonds between daughters and mothers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Not as shrill as The Women's Room but with a fund of trenchant observations about women's roles, French's hefty new novel, which appears on the 10th anniversary of her fiction debut, is a powerful if flawed work. The writing is rich in detail and insight but marred by an excess of feminist zeal that paints all men as autocratic monsters who are unable to love their children. French limns the lives of four generations of women in a Polish-American family. The narrator, born Anastasia Dabrowski, has by dint of a hard-won career as an intrepid photographer, achieved an independent identity as Stacey Stevens. Nearing 50, twice divorced, she is severely depressed, and she looks back at the lives of her mother and grandmother, and forward to the lives of her two daughters, to try to understand the cause. Stacey finds that in each generation women make bitter sacrifices for the sake of their offspring, while the children, especially the daughters, bitterly resent what they see as their mothers' guilt-producing martyrdom; they, in turn, seem destined to repeat their mothers' lives. Men are the villains here: tyrannical fathers who terrorize or desert their progeny. Eternally victimized in this male-dominated culture, women are deprived of comfort, love, security and peace of mind. French's descriptions of the bone-wearying, endless domestic drudgery of poverty-stricken women are among the most authentic work she has ever done; the travail of the weekly laundry routine is rendered in details no reader will forget. The plight of women who hold down jobs at the same time they are raising families is also depicted with rare accuracy. Writing of the "anger and despair and frustration and weariness'' of motherhood, French nevertheless comes to the conclusion that raising and nurturing children are woman's only true and emotionally satisfying role. Strong elements of autobiography seem to be present here (Stacey's mother's name is Isabelle; so is the author's mother, to whom the book is dedicated); it seems that no memory or detail has been omitted. On the one hand, this is a moving evocation of the fears and miseries of childhood and the frustrations of wife- and motherhood; on the other, the sheer mass of intensely recalled minutiae is slow moving rather than dramatic. French's contrasts are too intense; her outrage at men's power and women's double bind of servitude and martyrdom is often strident and vituperative. But the basic truths in this novel, and French's determined telling of them, will strike some resonant chords. Literary Guild main selection; major ad/promo.